Guest curator Pennylane Shen hosts an artist panel with the members of the artist collective Phantoms in the Front Yard: Jeremiah Birnbaum, James Knight, Paul Morstad, Jay Senetchko, Jonathan Sutton, with guest David Vegt as they discuss their new work, the idea of space, and the role of the figure in contemporary art.

The Phantoms exhibition SPACE revolves around the word itself and its various meanings, including the physical space of the venue itself. How does individual personal space relate to the physical space we share? Historically, Canadian artists have identified a sense of open geography – The North in its expanse beyond a sparse band of cities on a single national highway.

North Vancouver houses its own mythology of a vast wilderness beyond the back door. There are only two roads to cross from Capilano Lake to Alaska. Meanwhile we increasingly dwell in cities, which are themselves increasingly dense, North Vancouver’s rapid property development being no exception. On what scales do we map our daily experience? How do the individual spaces we inhabit sit and intersect within our larger geography? How do we affect the space around us, and how does it affect us?

Image credit: Beginnings of “Nova”, a work in progress for the upcoming show at theSeymour Gallery by guest artist David Vegt

(Founded in 2010, Phantoms in the Front Yard is a Vancouver-based touring art collective with the mandate to challenge the contemporary Canadian art scene, reviving the human subject as muse. Figurative art has become the phantom of the fine art world, haunting both Modernism and Postmodernism with its ties to a classical tradition, refusing to be dismissed, ignored or forgotten.)